Light @light@qoto.org

"Burn Book suggests Swisher doesn’t necessarily see tech’s cozy relationship with the military as problematic. Early on, she admits she dreamed of working as a strategic analyst for the military or Central Intelligence Agency but gave up that path because of how openly anti-gay the military was."

#EdwardOngwesoJr, 2024

This is 21st century Democrat politics in a nutshell. Technofascism is fine, as long as its power positions and their benefits aren't hoarded by straight, white, cis men.

(1/2)

Highly related: https://hightimes.com/culture/the-frank-gallagher-thesis-is-wrong-and-the-data-proves-it/

#UBI #politics #CDNPoli

US representative Ro Khanna was recently in the West Bank where he was detained by armed Israeli settlers.

When Israeli soldiers arrived, they sided with the settlers and continued to detain Khanna.

This is an excellent illustration of the concept of “legitimacy” when it comes to state violence that I’m frequently harping about. The legitimacy of an actor’s violence is a measure of the probability that other actors will endorse or support that violence. Here, the Israeli state is telling us that the settlers are adjuncts of the state and that the state will endorse and support their violence.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qyk9jwq9no

Also, I feel like the USA deserves a round of applause from Europe for this World Cup, where we not only hosted, but generously identified ourselves as movie villains and then were promptly destroyed. Really, what more could you want?

I love reading. I love writing. I love coding. I love drawing. I love creating.

Go ahead and make the slop machines faster, you can't take away what I love.

So if you ever wonder why the US political system seems so broken, why every progressive gain is so hard-fought and then easily reversed, why the easiest solutions seem endlessly out of reach, why someone as obscenely awful as Trump faces so little institutional resistance, why both major political parties share so much in common, why so many politicians seem to share the same handful of family names…

…then you will wonder less once you understand the US political system was, from the start, explicitly designed to behave in exactly this way, as a system of shared oligarchical rule meant to guarantee elites’ ability to extract rents from the vast majority of the public.

That was the point. They said so. They wrote it all down. This is easily knowable history. It’s just been obscured in the public understanding by the religious cult that US elites have built around the constitution and the framers as divinely guided sages who built the most perfect political system ever.

16/end

Nevermind that the wealth of those elites was built overwhelmingly on the exploitation of other people: on landed estates carved from indigenous lands and granted by the crown; on rents charged on landless tenants on those estates; on enslaved African and indigenous labor; on the importation of huge numbers of impoverished servants; on royal monopolies.

All of that wealth, those elites believed, was the product of those elites’ intelligence, hard work, and thrift. And those greedy poors would steal it from them the moment the had the chance.

At the opening of the constitutional convention, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, declared that “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”

12/

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger

The German government now intends to put into law to punish Germans with up to 5 years in jail if they deny Israel's "right to exist".

Such a law would of course very likely violate the German constitution, like virtually everything the current German government does these days. And Germany already has a law that protects anyone from incitement and hate against the group they belong to, including jews. A law that specifically protects Israel no matter what Israel does serves of course only to suppress valid criticism of genocide and Israel's hard-right course who currently want to attack Iran *again*. In a country that respects its own constitution, this planned law would never even have been proposed.

Hat tip to @mago.

As I write this, Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, is on visit in Israel, Germany's "good and close friend", to "keep communications channels open" as public hostility towards Israel increases.

And Germany's minister of the interior, Alexander Dobrindt, and the federal presidents of Germany's police have had multiple visits in Israel, Germany's "natural partner", to start training each other's police and to learn from Israel how it controls a population in an apartheid state using technology and AI (the real, working all-too-well AI, like computer vision, not the LLMs that are sold to us as "AI").

https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1201039.bundesrat-existenzrecht-israels-bundesrat-will-leugnung-des-existenzrechts-israels-bestrafen.html

#Israel #Germany #surveillance #authoritarianism

When We Create a Hostile Offline Environment for Teens, They Take Refuge Online

One of the things people talk about with age verification is that teens are sucked in and need to get off. That's not what's happening.

https://www.freezenet.ca/when-we-create-a-hostile-offline-environment-for-teens-they-take-refuge-online/

#Censorship #Editorial #News #ChatRoom #Internet #kids #social #SocialMedia #teens

The fall of Platner from Democratic politics (I expect him to re-appear as GOP or other) is an unqualified good. One of the things that helps to keep Nazis down is convincing them that Nazis don't get anything.

#uspol

If you ever forgave Platner for the Nazi tattoo and the rape fantasies and the allegations of assault and the imperialist mercenary work—even before the rape accusation—then you have no business, for even a moment, expressing confusion as to how anyone could support someone like Trump.

The most apt analogy for the relationship between the state and its subjects is to the farmer and a herd of livestock.

Once you internalize this, a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, and the relationships between them, become crystal clear.

Borders and immigration controls, concentration camps and genocide, national IDs and passports, conquest and forced migrations, taxes and conscription and corvée labor, slave labor and prison labor—it’s all just the state managing and harvesting from its herd.

@HeavenlyPossum

The livestock industry has applied ethologists like Temple Grandin to design systems that keep the herd calm and compliant during the breeding, fattening, and slaughtering processes, exemplified in papers such as "Transferring results of behavioral research to industry to improve animal welfare* on the farm, ranch, and slaughter plant," and the state has police, educators, scientists, psychologists, regulatory agencies, etc., to keep us calm and compliant as well. The sheep spends its life fearing the wolf only to be eaten by the shepherd.

* Industry jargon reflects the idea that livestock fares well when they don't cause trouble for their keepers.

So my firm conviction remains that if Trump were to order an actual military invasion of Greenland, the US military would simply not comply. I'm dead serious. The men and women of the armed forces of NATO countries have decades of intense training and actual deployments together, and the respect they tend to have for each other runs deep. There's no way a US service member is going to just turn his weapon on the very people they just spent training and deploying with.

Ordering such an invasion would mean the end of his entire administration and the single largest crisis in US history as the US military would face massive subordination and refusal to carry out orders.